Thursday, June 30, 2016

On Tuesday, I wrote that for the past two years, Egyptian Ramadan dramas have not been antisemitic, as many had been in years before.

Algemeiner expanded on my post by quoting from previous posts of mine on the topic, especially how the star of last year's blockbuster Ramadan series "Jewish Quarter" caused its lead actress to explain, in response to social media criticism, that just because she played a Jewess on TV doesn't mean that she is in any way a Zionist.

The last time I was quoted in Arab media, I think, was 2008 when a Hamas-leaning website mentioned that I had been keeping count at the time of how hundreds of Palestinians had been killed by their own actions that year, between clan clashes, infighting and honor killings.

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Abbas’s address contained a litany of lies based on a fabricated reality from the outset:“I would also like to thank you all for all the different kinds of aid you have given, aiding us in institution-building and helping us establish the bases for a democratic regime which will be stable in the future and which will be able to comply with international criteria for democracy, and in particular we want to establish a proper rule of law and proper respect for human rights.”
EUP parliamentarians – including Shulz and Juncker – silently swallowed these soothing words despite:

Gazan and West Bank Arabs having been denied the right to vote since 2006 or to choose a President to replace Abbas whose term of office had expired in 2010.

The “Palestinian National Authority” having been unilaterally disbanded by Abbas by decree on 3 January 2013

Honour killings and victimisation of gays continuing under Abbas’s regime

Life imprisonment being imposed for selling land to Jews.

A duplicitous Abbas further claimed:“Our history has been, frankly, one of a continued existence in this territory since the dawn of civilization until now”Utter nonsense.
The “Palestinians” were defined for the first time in history in 1964 by article 6 of the PLO Charter:“The Palestinians are those Arab citizens who were living normally in Palestine up to 1947, whether they remained or were expelled. Every child who was born to a Palestinian parent after this date whether in Palestine or outside is a Palestinian.”The Arab citizens of Palestine formed part of the “existing non-Jewish communities” in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.Exclusively high-jacking the term “Palestinians” constitutes racist-inspired semantic fraud.

It is vital that European and American leaders make clear to Abbas that his anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories about Israel are unacceptable and will be rejected out of hand.
Further, it needs to be said that, not only must he and the PA stop the incitement against Israel and Jews, but President Abbas should stop propagandizing against Israel to the Europeans and others.
It would be far more productive for him to finally sit down and conduct direct negotiations with Israel. This is the only path to peace and a two-state solution.
And yet, Abbas rejected Israeli President Rueben Rivlin’s offer to meet during their shared time in Brussels. To a certain degree, one can understand this decision. Why meet with an Israeli leader when European officials roundly will endorse his canards and not force him to explain his baseless accusations?
The world must stop encouraging Abbas’ hateful and counterproductive path. If not, we will only hear more outlandish statements by him, which harm peace efforts, which harm Israel and which harm the Palestinians most of all.

In the Brexit vote, Brits chose to reject those patronizing views and express their nationalism. By this, they seem to have meant that they want to make the key decisions about their future, and about how they live, through their own democratic institutions. On the BBC on Friday morning, a typically biased interviewer spoke with Radek Sikorski, the former foreign minister of Poland, who denounced Brexit as dangerous and malevolent. His anger and resentment were so great that they finally moved even the BBC to defend the vote. How? On democratic grounds. Don’t people have a right to vote? Isn’t self-rule sacred? It was half amusing, half inspiring to see the interviewer rise to the defense of his countrymen and -women when they were treated with contempt for choosing Westminster over Brussels. There is a message here for Israelis — and for Americans.
For Israelis, the referendum fight helps explain their unpopularity among European elites. If nationalism is primitive and infantile and dangerous, it is no wonder that Israel is criticized endlessly and its efforts to defend itself are seen as excessive. Its basic demand — to be understood and acknowledged as a Jewish state — is itself considered illicit; ethno-national states are out of the question these days. Defending your state with actual guns is positively medieval in the eyes of today’s European leaders. Americans beg to differ, and that’s a reason that Israel is more popular here. Believing in your country and defending it with your army is considered patriotic here, not primitive. The sacrifice of sovereignty to bureaucrats abroad would offend Americans just as it offends so many Britons. All this helps explain Donald Trump’s successes this year, for he speaks a language of nationalism: defending borders and controlling immigration, for example, which was also a central issue in the British debate. That call to “Make America Great Again” is a reflection of nationalism, and it has found a wide audience.

Today, Israelis and Palestinians gathered at an international exhibition of agriculture in the heart of Tel Aviv, in which the Civil Administration arranged participation for Palestinians in order to learn about cutting-edge agricultural technology to develop their businesses.

Here, an opportunity was presented to create ties with Israeli farmers, network with experts in the industry, and learn about advanced innovations in the agricultural market.

The exhibition was AgroMashov. According to Ma'an Arabic, 150 Palestinian Arab farmers attended

About a thousand Palestinian farmers are helped every year by the efforts of COGAT - which is part of the IDF.

This sort of thing flummoxes the boycotters. If a thousand Palestinian farmers are anxious to work with Israel on growing and marketing their goods, then don't they know what's best for themselves without having holier-than-thou hypocrites tell them to voluntarily starve for the cause?

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Everyone says Israel does a poor job of hasbara, but the question is “what is the job?”

Hasbara is information, propaganda, public diplomacy, clarification of policies, telling the truth about Israel or telling lies. It depends on whom you ask.Folks who don’t like what I write sometimes call me a ‘hasbarist’, which is apparently something like a pederast.

One form of hasbara – defensive hasbara – responds to what Richard Landes likes to call ‘cognitive warfare’. Cognitive warfare is a real thing that nations and ideological activists expend a lot of effort and money on and which can have serious, concrete effects.

Cognitive attacks can be targeted at different populations and intended to produce different effects. It can be aimed at an enemy population to demoralize it, reduce support for its leadership, destroy will to fight, create confusion, or cause the leaders to make mistakes. It can also be aimed at third-party nations, to keep them from supporting the target. Cognitive warfare techniques can also be used to strengthen one’s own population’s identification with particular policies.

Israel’s enemies flood the world’s media and institutions like the UN with descriptions of the IDF’s ‘disproportionate’ use of force, ‘excessive’ civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons, cruelty and even deliberate targeting of children. Defensive operations are portrayed as unprovoked aggression. These accusations are either exaggerated, presented out of context or made up from whole cloth – sometimes they are based on faked or doctored video, the so-called ‘pallywood’. Documentation is often no more than unsupported statements from Palestinians, laundered via the NGO ‘halo effect’ (“if Human Rights Watch reports it, it must be true”) to give them credibility. Organizations like ‘Breaking the Silence’ spread unsubstantiated allegations of war crimes both in Israel and abroad. A massive quantity of accusations are made in order to overwhelm our capacity to respond.

The campaign gets results: the IDF adopts tactics to reduce collateral damage even further, to the extent that its operational effectiveness and morale of its troops are impacted. Israel is deterred from initiating operations that might result in legal action against its officers and soldiers. Unfriendly regimes in the US are unopposed when they act to turn Israeli military victories into political defeats or cut off deliveries of weapons in wartime. Sympathy for terrorist entities like Hamas and Hezbollah make it possible for them to ‘stay in business’ between conflicts and rearm. Israeli young people may even be influenced by the smear campaign to avoid military service so as not to be involved in what they are told is an immoral enterprise.

The BDS campaign that is being waged all over the world, including Europe, South Africa, Australia and the US, is a major cognitive offensive. While it is doubtful that it can ever amount to more than an economic pinprick against Israel, that isn’t its primary objective. What it has already been successful at doing, whether or not resolutions to boycott, sanction or divest are passed, is to give currency to the idea that Israel’s behavior is so egregious that decent people are expected to shun it. Even where anti-BDS laws or resolutions have been passed, these are spun as a response by ‘Jewish power’ to justified grass-roots outrage.

Defensive hasbara counteracts these sorts of cognitive warfare. Although the sheer volume of false accusations makes it difficult, they must be refuted before they can be turned into concrete legal or diplomatic challenges.

The role of the government and the army in responding to false accusations is key, because only they have the access and authority necessary to find out the truth about incidents that happened in war or in confrontations between soldiers and civilians. The record of the Israeli authorities in this arena has been spotty at best. One of the worst failures was the case of the alleged killing of Mohammed al-Dura in 2000, which almost certainly was a scripted ‘Pallywood production’ in which neither the young al-Dura nor his father were wounded. A map showed that IDF soldiers could not have shot them. Nevertheless, shortly after the incident, the IDF officially apologized for the young al-Dura’s ‘death’!

Defensive hasbara is one piece of the puzzle, a necessary response to cognitive attacks, but in itself not sufficient to win the cognitive war. If all we do is defend ourselves, the result is that we simply help spread the accusations (I’m reminded of an anecdote about Lyndon Johnson advising his PR person to spread the story that an opposing candidate had sex with chickens in order to force him to publicly deny it). We can’t afford to ignore specific accusations, but we also need to ensure that people on our side have access to a correct account of our historical, moral and legal rights to the land of Israel as well as the justification of specific policies.

The thrust of Palestinian Arab propaganda – and it indeed is thrust at the world continuously – is that the Jews stole the land from an indigenous Palestinian people and Israel occupies it today (on both sides of the Green Line) as a cruel racist, colonialist oppressor. As long as this story is believed, then there will continue to be pressure for ‘justice’, which usually involves changes to borders and security features (e.g., the elimination of the security barrier or the blockade of Gaza) that will advance the Arab program to destroy the Jewish state and kill or disperse its people.

Just as the Palestinians and their supporters have a logically consistent (but false) narrative of history and current events to justify their demands, we too need to develop and broadcast our (in this case true) narrative. In contrast to defensive hasbara, I’ll call this positive hasbara.

If we were doing this, we would advocate for our narrative in both the inward and outward directions, in our own educational system and also in our informational efforts to the outside world. The narrative would rest on a Zionist philosophical foundation, accurate historical scholarship and solid legal argumentation. All our organs of state – the Prime Minister and government, the Foreign and Defense Ministries, the army, the Broadcasting Authority, and more – would be on the same page when it comes to our basic right to have a Jewish state here, why we must maintain military control of the territories, why Jews have a right to live anywhere in the land of Israel, and why our security measures are justified.

Needless to say, this is not the case today. We tell the world how much we want peace with the Palestinians, how beautiful our beaches are, how gay-friendly we are, how we have a lot of high-tech startups, how our medical technology is the best in the world, how our soldiers are nice to cute Arab kids, and how the terrorists murder us. The world responds by saying that terrorism is our fault because we don’t ‘end the occupation’, ‘stop settlement activity’ and ‘free Palestine’.

The necessary messages are not getting through because they are not being sent. Why is this?

We have a political and social culture that is very tolerant of political diversity. A small percentage of Israelis tend to be extremely, even pathologically, critical of the state, and at the same time sit in key positions in our most important information-related institutions, not to mention the ministries, the courts, even the army. There are academics, media personalities, artists and intellectuals who are anti-Zionist and anti-state. Instead of Naomi Shemer we have Aviv Geffen. University faculties are ludicrously unbalanced toward the Left.

These individuals can directly create roadblocks, but they also foster a lack of confidence on the part of others who don’t share their point of view. In Israel, unabashed Zionists are considered at least naïve and often extremists. Nobody wants to look silly.

Because we don’t project a consistent message that justifies our existence, we should not be surprised that people all over the world don’t bother to sort through the contradictory messages – including many that can only be called suicidal – that emanate from Israel, and instead prefer the simple call for ‘justice for the Palestinian people’.

I don’t have a solution for this problem. We aren’t Yasser Arafat, who created a unitary voice for the Palestinians by murdering anyone who disagreed with him. We aren’t the Soviets, who tightly controlled all means of expression and sent people to the Gulag for illegally using a typewriter. But as long as we don’t unite behind a Zionist ideal, we won’t be able to present a counter-view for the Palestinian narrative. And indeed, we won’t have an answer for the nihilism of the post-Zionist Left among us.

Shimon Peres said that you don’t need hasbara if you have good policy. This is wrong for many reasons, but one of them is that you can’t have good policy if you don’t have a consistent understanding of who you are and what your objectives are. You can’t fight a cognitive war over your legitimacy if you don’t know what the basic arguments for that legitimacy are. You can’t negotiate if you don’t know what you can compromise and what you can’t. Positive hasbara is more than propaganda, it’s also getting our own selves clear about what we ought to do and why.

***

Cognitive warfare is real and dangerous. Defensive hasbara is the necessary response. We can improve our execution of it by adding money and manpower to the effort to counter the enemy lie machine. It’s difficult, but we know how to do it. And we should.

Positive hasbara, answering the Palestinian narrative with a persuasive one of our own, is a much harder task, because it requires that we have a consistent national narrative that we feel comfortable asserting. And we don’t.

And that’s the answer to the question at the beginning of this post: “the job” we need to do is a political one, not just a PR operation: it is no less than to unite Israel’s Jews under a Zionist ideological banner. Until we are successful at this, the only hasbara game we can play will be the defensive one.

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A 13-year-old girl died after being stabbed repeatedly by a Palestinian assailant who entered her bedroom in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba Thursday morning. Another man was seriously wounded in the terror attack.
The victim, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, was rushed to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem unconscious, not breathing and in critical condition, where doctors said they were unable to save her.A 31-year-old man also suffered multiple stab wounds and shooting injuries in the attack, according to rescue and hospital officials.
It appears the man, a civilian guard responding to the attack, was accidentally shot by other guards in an effort to neutralize the terrorist, according to initial reports.
The assailant was shot and killed, the Israel Defense Forces said.
The Palestinian health ministry identified him as Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah, 17, from Bani Naim, adjacent to Kiryat Arba.
Local officials said the home lies on the edge in the Ramat Mamre neighborhood, adjacent to a fence surrounding the settlement. A picture released by the IDF showed the bedroom with blood smeared on beds and the floor.According to an initial account, the attacker jumped the fence — a breach that sent an alert to the IDF and civilian security guards in the area — and broke into the girl’s bedroom, where she was sleeping.

The mother of a 13-year-old girl murdered in her bedroom in a terror attack Thursday morning tearfully recalled her daughter’s last moments, as politicians and others expressed outrage over the stabbing attack inside a West Bank settlement home.“Like all adolescents during summer vacation, my daughter was asleep — tranquil, calm — and a terrorist came and murdered her in her bed,” Rina Ariel, the mother of Hallel Yaffa Ariel, told reporters outside Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem where the teenager was taken after sustaining critical injuries in the attack earlier Thursday.She arrived with multiple stab wounds to her upper body and was pronounced dead shortly after.
Ariel was stabbed to death in her room on Thursday morning when a Palestinian teen, identified as Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah, 17, from Bani Na’im, jumped the fence into the settlement, broke into her house and stabbed her to death, before also stabbing a civilian security guard who arrived at the scene. Tarayrah was shot and killed by other guards.

Hallel Yafa Ariel, 13 and a half years old, was on summer vacation, having just finished the 8th grade.

Hallel was related to Israeli Minister Uri Ariel.

The terrorist-murderer was 17 years old, Muhammad Taraiyre, from the village of Bani Naim. He climbed the fence at 8:44 AM, was spotted by security cameras, but made his way quickly to the Ariel house and murdered Hallel Yafa by stabbing her dozens of times while she was asleep in her bed.

The terrorist was neutralized by a member of the civilian Rapid Response Team. Another member of the team, Yehoshua Gilboa, was severely injured. The determination and drive of the RRT stopped this terror event from spreading any further.

The funeral will begin at the family’s home in Ramat Mamre “Kharsina” neighborhood of Kiryat Arba. The procession will conclude at the Ancient Jewish Cemetery in Hebron where the burial will take place. The funeral is expected to draw Ministers, Knesset Members, Rabbis and other spiritual and cultural leaders.

You can sign up for it with Facebook (just so I have an idea of how many are coming, a few people told me they would come but didn't sign up...)

Hope to see many of you there!

In case you are wondering, the venue is outside the Green Line. So Amnesty, HRW, the UN and the EU may consider this speech a "settlement activity" and a violation of international law - because I happen to be Jewish.

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Ever since Yisrael (Robert) Aumann won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work in game theory, I've wanted to ask him whether game theory can accommodate irrational actors such as Israel's enemies.

I got my chance as I met him in his office at Hebrew University on Tuesday.

His answer to me was that the question itself was wrong - Israel's enemies, and even suicide bombers, are rational, and the goals that they are pursuing are important to understand if we are going to come up with a good strategy against them.

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Israel commits racist crimes. A prominent example is the police’s violence during the demonstrations by young Ethiopian men and women a year ago. (Police violence, incidentally, isn’t limited to young Ethiopians; many young Arabs encounter it as well.) Another example is the investigation that revealed the pressure on Ethiopian women to receive shots of the birth control hormone Depo-Provera before immigrating.

There was no pressure whatsoever to tell Ethiopian women that they must receive Depo-Provera before immigrating. The only organization that provides contraceptive counseling to Ethiopian women before coming to Israel was the American Joint Distribution Committee, and they emphatically and specifically denied any such practice. My own investigation showed that many Ethiopian women were volunteering to take the contraceptive because it could more easily be kept secret from their husbands, but Haaretz' libel (then and now) that the State of Israel pressured the women to take Depo-Provera before immigrating is 100% false.

An multi-year investigation by the state comptroller also showed that there was no evidence of requiring Ethiopian women to take Depo-Provera before coming to Israel.

No one is denying that racism exists in Israel, but this article in Haaretz is attempting to prove that there is institutional racism, and that is simply a lie. I spoke with MK Avraham Neguise, the only Ethiopian member of Knesset, yesterday, and he was emphatic about that point. (Full video coming soon.)

If I would have known that Haaretz would be resurrecting the libel, I would have asked him about this specifically.

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A teenage girl who sustained critical injuries on Thursday morning in a stabbing attack in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba died of her wounds. Another man was seriously wounded in the incident.

The victim, Hallel Yaffe Ariel, 13, was repeatedly stabbed in the upper body and was taken to Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem unconscious, not breathing and in critical condition, where she later died.

She was stabbed in her own bedroom.

So how do Western-funded media cover this story?

Ma'an News Agency gets lots of money from the EU to promulgate quality journalism. It started off its coverage of this event by writing "a 17-year old boy was martyred" in the process of killing the female "settler" whose age is not mentioned.

This sort of glorification of terrorists and dehumanization of Jews that one can see every day in even the most liberal Palestinian publications.

It is bad enough that Palestinian newspapers are so sickening. But why does the EU have to fund them? It is not as if there is any notable influence towards making these news outlets more liberal or moderate towards the Arabic-reading audience.

Ma'an English is far more careful about its language. It pretty much exists to keep the funding coming, and the funders are too blind and wedded to their cause to even want to know the truth about how their money indirectly causes attacks like this.

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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Fatah's Facebook page is celebrating Fawaz Fayez being released from Israeli prison after a fifteen year prison sentence.

Which photo did they choose to emphasize the essence of Mr. Fayez?

This one, of course:

I don't know what he was convicted. But I do see from this photo that the gun is the focal point of the announcement celebrating his release.

NGOs like Amnesty and DCI-P like to tell the West that Israel does not follow due process, that Israel is wantonly imprisoning innocent people.

But from the Palestinian perspective, the prisoners who are heroes are not famous because of their innocence but because of their guilt. The fame of the prisoner is directly proportional to the number of Jews he killed or injured.
Now, consider that releasing prisoners is one of the "red lines" that Abbas insists on in any peace deal. He is not demanding their release because they were unjustly imprisoned. He wants their release because the murderers and wannabe murderers are the rock stars of the Palestinian universe and are wanted as the builders of their desired state.

In a society where warlords are the heroes and murderers are celebrated, expecting a lasting peace is a pipe-dream.

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On May 25, 2016, the delegates of the 69th World Health Assembly (held under the auspices of the World Health Organization) in Geneva adopted a decision condemning Israel. Out of 24 items on the meeting’s agenda, only Item 19 focused on political issues – specifically on “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan”.
Representatives of one-hundred and seven countries voted in favor of the resolution, with eight voting against, while others either abstained or did not take part in the vote. Commenting on this activity, Hillel Neuer, of Geneva-based UN Watch declared, “Shame on Britain, France and Germany for encouraging this hijacking of the annual world health assembly, and diverting precious time, money, and resources from global health priorities, in order to wage a political prosecution of Israel, especially when, in reality, anyone who has ever walked into an Israeli hospital or clinic knows that they are providing world-class health care to thousands of Palestinian Arabs, as well as to Syrians fleeing Assad.”
The documents accompanying the resolution include blatant propaganda from the Syrian and Palestinian health ministries. (The Syrian “report” is absurdly entitled Health Conditions of Syrian Citizens in the Occupied Syrian Golan.) The report of the Palestinian Ministry of Health to the World Health Organization, dated May 20, 2016, is based on numerous wild accusations with minimal citations. For example, the text (p. 29) asserts that “In April 2013 the Russian newspaper Pravda accused Israel of injecting a number of Palestinian prisoners who were approaching their release date with cancer-causing viruses. Despite Israel’s rejection of the accusations made by the newspaper, the question remains: is it true that Israel is injecting prisoners with viruses?”
Many similar allegations have no citations or sources – instead, the text includes “references” to political bodies and NGOs with no medical credentials. For example, Euro- Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor is a strictly political group whose Chairman of the Board of Trustees, former UN Rapporteur Richard Falk, has been widely denounced for his extreme anti-Israel and antisemitic agenda.
In addition, the Palestinian document includes a number of graphic images, designed to reinforce the narrative of Palestinian victimization and Israeli responsibility. A detailed analysis by the CAMERA media watchdog demonstrated that the imaged claiming to show Israelis “attacking a Palestinian child while being observed by Israeli occupation forces” in fact was a conflict between Israelis and included no Palestinians. Similarly, a “photograph taken during the Israeli war on Gaza, 2014” was shown to be an artificial image that was created digitally.

A digital activist has turned the tables on neo-Nazi and white supremacist trolls by using their own tool to track and identify their antisemitic activity online, news and culture site Fusion reported on Tuesday.According to the report, using the same technology behind the now-banned “Coincidence Detector,” Daniel Sieradski has found a way to out antisemites who launch attacks on Jews and their allies with his “Nazi Detector.”
As reported by The Algemeiner earlier in June, Google Chrome pulled the innocuous-sounding neo-Nazi plug-in after it was revealed that it was being used to track Jews online. Using a special web construction called an “(((echo)))” — three parentheses around the names of targets — white supremacists were able to encase the names of Jews that appeared on a webpage and attack them online. Each new Jewish or anti-white personality identified by the extension was then added to a database of names which was updated regularly.
The extension was uploaded by “altrightmedia,” a nod to the emerging far-Right movement made up of young, tech-savvy white supremacists. Since the use of the (((echo))) became public knowledge, both Jews and non-Jews alike have encased their names in an (((echo))) as an act of defiance.Using this same logic, Sieradski created a Chrome browser extension that pulls from a database of names and bookends a user’s name in swastikas. After asking a journalist for the original Coincidence Detector database, Sieradski told Fusion he “just hacked away at it for a few minutes” and the Nazi Detector was born.
“I just whipped it together the other day when the idea popped into my head,” he said.

StandWithUs+: LGBTQ Rights

What began with the persecution of LGBTQ, Jews, and other minorities in the Middle East, has now spread throughout the world because of extremist religious ideology.

Note how they phrase this: they aren't saying that the artists agree with BDS, only that they have either "refused" or cancelled performances after BDS threats.

Anyway, when Carlos Santana canceled a concert in 2010, the BDSers counted this as a victory.

This year, Santana is coming to Israel. His manager said, “Carlos Santana is a citizen of the World and he plays his music and spreads his message of Love, Light & Peace wherever he goes. Carlos believes the World should have no borders so he is not detoured or discouraged to play anywhere on this planet. We look forward to performing in Israel this summer.

The BDSers are muy upset and they are trying to bully him into changing his mind.

His people are completely ignoring the ratcheted pressure, which is driving the haters crazy. They are trying to pressure him through a children's charity foundation he started.

From a BDS newsletter:

Yesterday US Campaign member groups Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) attempted to deliver a petition signed by 25,000 people urging musician Carlos Santana to respect the call for a cultural boycott of Israel in support of Palestinian human rights and cancel his upcoming concert in Tel Aviv, scheduled for July 30.

The delegation, including local Palestinian families with children, visited the offices of Santana’s Milagro Foundation, which he founded in 1998 and is devoted to helping "underserved and vulnerable children around the world." Staff at the office had not responded to several requests for an appointment, refused to open the door when the delegation arrived, and closed the blinds.

Santana's charitable foundation is treating BDSholes like the harassers they are.

I hope they call the police next.

Santana's Milagro Foundation has given grants to Israeli organizations that help both Jewish and Arab kids, like SHAI and Hand in Hand: Center for Jewish-Arab Education in Israel. BDSers are against such grants because they violate their boycott of Israel!

Clearly, Santana and his foundation care far more about Arab kids in the region than all the BDSers combined.

The Milagro Foundation is more than justified to tell the BDS haters to drop dead.

Trenton, June 29 - As part of a legislative package passed on Monday that barred the state pension fund from investing in companies that boycott Israel, New Jersey General Assembly and Senate members also initiated a mandated weekly activity in which one lawmaker will seize the underwear band of a BDS activist from the back and pull it upwards with enough force to jam the fabric of the garment into the wearer's intergluteal cleft and, if possible, ripping the waistband itself from the remainder of the garment.

A provision of the measure divesting from the Israel-divestment advocates calls for a literal divestment of said advocates in the form of a wedgie, a classic prank associated with the debasement of the person receiving the wedgie. Legislators from both major parties spoke out in favor of both the overall anti-BDS bill and the specific wedgie provision of it, and called on Governor Chris Christie to sign the bill into law. The governor is expected to do so.

"This is an important statement that we will not accept the nonsense that the BDS movement peddles, and that their bullying tactics will only backfire," said State Senator Minerva Melvin, a Democrat of District 18 in the central part of the state. "It is high time these thugs receive a taste of their own medicine, and I, for one, look forward to administering an atomic wedgie or two, and cheering on my colleagues to do the same." An Atomic Wedgie, she explained, involves pulling the back of the underwear over the target's head.

Republican Frank Brastrap of neighboring District 17 noted the rare bipartisanship that characterized both the deliberations and voting on the measure. "Some issues are too important to be subjected to partisan politics, and hoisting BDS with its own petard is one of the issues firmly in bipartisan consensus in this state and in the country at large," he gushed. "And speaking of hoisting, I intend to find a good hook or door handle or something from which to hang any activists with the misfortune to have me as their wedgie provider."

BDS advocates admit they feel squeezed by the law. "But I'm not going to let the threat of wedgies intimidate me into silence," vowed activist Paur Aziz, a student at Rutgers University. "All these Zionist-owned legislators should know that intimidation is OUR strategy, and we do not stand idly by when others turn around and use it against us."

Aziz declined to comment on reports that an amendment to the bill has already been proposed, under which swirlies would be added to the treatment meted out against BDS advocates.

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

In part it is a reaction to the canards being circulated by the Palestinian Authority and its leader Mahmoud Abbas that allege Israel intends to harm the mosques on the Temple Mount. That there are no such plans and that, in fact, the Israelis are enforcing a discriminatory rule intended to placate Muslims, has had no impact on the spread of these myths. Just as Arab leaders used similar stories about Jewish plots to incite pogroms against Jews in the 1920s and 30s, so, too, has Abbas helped to incite the current “stabbing intifada” in order to compete with his Hamas rivals for the support of the Palestinian public.
But the agenda behind the lies about Israeli plots goes deeper than the Fatah-Hamas rivalry. As Abbas and Hamas leaders have often made clear, neither group recognizes the legitimacy of Jewish historical claims in Jerusalem. Abbas helped engineer a UNESCO ruling that treated the Temple Mount and even the Western Wall as sites that were solely Muslim. Their ultimate goal isn’t so much to enforce the current discriminatory status quo that exists in Jerusalem as it is to go back to the pre-June 1967 situation where Jews were altogether banned from visiting the Temple Mount and the Wall.
Surely such an outcome is unthinkable and peace deals that speak of freedom of worship would never countenance a return to that sort of blind prejudice. But if Muslim violence can effectively create a ban on non-Muslims entering the Temple Mount, a place to sacred to all the monotheistic religions, while the city is under Israeli rule, why would anyone think Jewish rights or those of Christians would be protected were the city to be re-divided?
As we have seen with Abbas’s anti-Semitic statements about Jews poisoning Palestinian water and his praise of terrorists who wish to prevent holy sites being profaned by “stinking Jewish feet,” the notion that the dispute is primarily one about territory or settlements has been proven false. The century-old war on Zionism has always had at its core a degree of intolerance for the Jewish presence and a desire on the part of Arabs to erase Jewish history. The rocks being thrown on the Temple Mount are a product of hate, not a misunderstanding about where the borders between two states should be drawn. They are a symbol of a conflict that can only be resolved when the Palestinians give up their dreams about a return to an era of discrimination against Jews.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah voiced exasperation today following the Israel Police’s decision to bar all non-Muslims from the Temple Mount for the remainder of the month of Ramadan in an effort to prevent further unrest, saying that excluding the members of any faith from praying on, let alone merely entering, the sacred plateau accomplishes the exact opposite of the inclusive divine vision for the site.Isaiah the son of Amotz, who prophesied for several Jewish kings in the ninth and eight centuries BCE, told reporters that he did not know what he had to do to get it into humanity’s thick skulls that the Temple Mount cannot be characterized by Apartheid, under which only people of a certain faith may visit or commune with the Creator. He lambasted the police for the decision, which he said reinforces a discriminatory regime that undermines everything he and the other prophets worked for.
“In one fell swoop, the police caved to threats of violence from thugs who want to negate anyone else’s right to engage with God from the location where humanity was created,” charged the prophet, referring to the teaching that the clod of Earth from which humanity was fashioned was taken from the spot where the Temple’s external altar would later stand. “Whereas the Creator shared with us a picture of all people having a common origin and a path to relationship with Him, the police send a message that anyone who gets violent, possessive, and forceful enough can obstruct or negate that path for others.”
The police ban was imposed this week after violent episodes in which worshipers at the Al Aqsa Mosque atop the Temple Mount attacked non-Muslims, especially Jews, with rocks and fireworks they had stockpiled in the mosque itself. Isaiah called the violence a manifestation of everything wrong with the world.

A school in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday covered up a map of “historic Palestine” — which is today the modern State of Israel — ahead of a visit by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

The map at an UNRWA institution in the Hamas-run enclave where Ban gave a press conference was seen in photos concealed by a white sheet.

Pierre Krähenbühl, the UN agency chief who was accompanying Ban on Tuesday, did not immediately comment.

Palestinians were upset, as news sites quoted outraged Gazans. But an UNRWA spokesperson denied that UNRWA was behind this.

I don't know what was behind the decision. It would be very hard to cover up UNRWA's official stance about the two state solution. After all, they certainly don't teach it in their schools, and as I have noted in the past, many of the UNRWA school logos themselves include maps of the entire British Mandate Palestine.

These are official UNRWA school logos that include the UN logos along with the Israel being erased.

Is anyone so naive as to think that Ban Ki Moon is unaware of this?

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Tuesday, June 28, 2016

The paranoia of Arabs about ancient Jewish presence in the Middle East has reached a new level of absurdity. From Syria's Zaman al-Wasl:

Well-informed sources revealed to Zaman al-Wasl that secret excavation operations in the historic city of Palmyra are underway, aiming to find claimed Jewish antiquities backed by Russia which has the upper hand in the city.

The sources said controversy over the nature of some activities in Palmyra following arrival of 3 unknown experts in Palmyra. They move in Palmyra in great reservation protected by Russian soldiers. They do not communicate with Syrian employees, but only communicate with Russians via an interpreter.

The doubts have deepened after knowing the points on which the experts have been focusing in their tours of excavations. The excavated sites are brought up often by Israelis referring to it in their talks claiming it includes Hebrew engravings and antiquities. They could use to prove their historical presence in the region according to their common tactic in dealing with different cities.

The sources start in their talk to Zaman al-Wasl from the minute the Russians came into Palmyra after they expelled ISIS. Russians hastened to spread and create a base in Palmyra’s historical sites until they established a camp and military base inside the archeological area.

In Palmyra, according to the sources, the Russian soldiers and intelligence worked for a duration with Syrian regime mercenaries and soldiers. During that period, they were partners in robbing and selling archeological artifacts according to their power and military presence; however, this partnership did not last long as Russians revealed their intentions fast. They excluded the regime and singled out power for themselves in the heart of the historical city which is considered a museum full of treasures and antiquities rare to find in the world.

The sources said the experts are communicating with Russian exclusively via an interpreter. Their work is limited to mostly searching for Jewish engravings that might be a document to place Palmyra on the lıst of Jewısh cities according to what they are seeking.

The experts focus their activities, according to our sources, on the following areas: al-Naser Arch, Bel Temple, Baalshamin Temple, Diocletian camp. They performed big excavations in some of these areas aiming to reach deeper layers that have not been reached before by previous excavation missions.

Some excavations resulted in discovering a mummy and an amount of gold in the area next to al-Naser Arch according to the sources who confirmed that experts continue excavations under al-Naser Arch and in the street extending to the theater and Bel Temple. They are tirelessly searching for stone tombs that might carry Hebrew engravings.

The sources strongly indicated the deliberate destruction which al-Naser Arch, Bel Temple, and Baalshamin Temple were exposed to might have been planned to pave the way for the excavations of the unknown experts. The reason is that digging on deep layers before destruction might have damaged these sites and no party would have dared to do so before, whereas they can do that now under pretext of restoring the sites.

In fact, Palmyra had a significant Jewish population in ancient times and up through the 12th century at least when Benjamin of Tudela visited. One house famously has verses of the Shema in Hebrew on its doorpost, in an apparent method to build a mezuzah directly into it.

But as we've seen with Jordan, the Arabs are so paranoid about "Greater Israel" that they believe that Jews are constantly trying to take over their lands by pretending that they are in fact historically Jewish areas.

Apparently the Russians are just as much pawns of this evil Jewish game as the Americans are.

And so, of course, is ISIS. Last year when ISIS controlled the city and was assumed to be destroying all ancient artifacts, Syrian and Iraqi scholars said that this was all part of an "international Jewish mafia" plot to erase all traces of Arab culture from the city and replace it with Jewish antiquities.

(h/t Yoel)

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After the last war, Israel eased some of their restrictions, and hundreds of Gazans crossed every day. Most of the people who obtained permits were either businessmen or local staff members of international organizations.
Fewer than 10 people were sitting on the chairs waiting for the soldier in the glass enclosure to call each name. Many of them were mothers with their children. Most, I assumed, were patients in need of medical treatment.
They called me a few minutes after I arrived. An Israeli soldier, sitting on a tall chair behind the glass, gave me my permit and my I.D.
It is rare that I see an Israeli in person; Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and I was too young then to remember their presence. However, I witnessed three wars in less than six years. The last one was devastating. I remember the warplanes and F-16s and artillery shells.
At Erez, I saw members of the Israeli defense forces, but not the same ones who fought in wars that left people dead and homes destroyed. I saw Israeli soldiers working administrative jobs, soldiers who help people wanting to leave. I used English with them because I felt they wouldn’t understand me otherwise — though they speak Arabic very well. (h/t Zvi)

The U.S. government funnels millions of taxpayer dollars into groups
that promote anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views, according to a
forthcoming report from a watchdog for non-governmental organizations.
Determining the exact dollar amount is impossible to total due to a
lack of transparency and widespread discrepancies in federal spending
databases, the group NGO Monitor found in a new study that will be
published later this month.U.S. grants have gone to organizations that have called for the
international community to divest from Israel, rationalized terrorist
attacks against the Jewish state, and compared Israelis to Nazis.Naftali Balanson, the chief of staff at NGO Monitor, said groups that
promote policies that directly contradict U.S. government support for
peace efforts should be disqualified from receiving funding.
“We encourage the end of all funding, both directly and indirectly,
for NGOs that participate in the demonization and delegitimization
campaigns,” Balanson said during a meeting last week on Capitol Hill.
“When you have organizations that are receiving money ostensibly for
peace, human rights, and democracy but they refuse to work with Israeli
partners, they refuse to meet with Israelis, and push for boycotts,
those are in direct contradiction and seems to be a complete waste of
taxpayer money,” he added.The NGO Monitor report cited Jewish Voice for Peace, American Friends
Service Committee, and the New York-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund as
groups that engage in anti-Israel rhetoric.

The Knesset’s Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee on Monday approved a softened version of the controversial NGO transparency bill for a second and third reading.
According to the final draft of the bill, representatives of organizations that receive the majority of their funding from foreign states will not be forced to wear special tags in the Knesset, as was originally stipulated, and the law will only apply to donations received from January 2017. Earlier drafts had suggested the law be applied retroactively.
The proposed legislation stipulates that the organizations will need to note their funding sources on letters to public officials and in advertisements, but omits the requirement to list their funding in appeals to Israeli courts. The organizations, before they appear in Knesset hearings, will also have to update the lawmakers on their foreign funding, but won’t need to testify to that effect during the meetings. The groups, primarily left-wing human rights groups, must report their funding sources to the national NGO registry, which, in turn, is required to make that information public.

Arab immigration to France and deep-seated anti-Semitism in that country mean French Jews have no future there, the head of the Jewish Agency for Israel said.
Natan Sharansky made this declaration on Monday in the French capital, where he was attending a Jewish Agency Board of Governors meeting, held in the city for the first time as a sign of solidarity with French Jews.
“We came here because there are historical processes here,” Sharansky said of France, which for the past two years has been Israel’s largest source of immigrants thanks to a record-setting 15,000 Jews who settled in Israel in that time.“There is no future for the Jews in France because of the Arabs, and because of a very anti-Israel position in society, where new anti-Semitism and ancient anti-Semitism converge,” Sharansky told JTA.
Since 2012, Islamists have killed eight Jews in two shooting attacks that came amid hundreds of nonlethal violent assaults. A French citizen with alleged ties to Islamist groups is standing trial in France for a third shooting in 2014 at the Jewish Museum of Belgium, in which four people died.

“In a democracy it is occasionally necessary to defer to the wishes of the majority,” observed Queen Victoria’s favourite prime minister, the old “Hebrew conjuror” Benjamin Disraeli. It is a lesson that many on the losing side of Britain’s 23 June referendum on whether the country should quit or remain in the European Union don’t want to learn. These sore losers of the left have in their millions put their names to an online petition to Parliament demanding a second referendum, on the flimsy excuse that less than 75 per cent of the electorate turned out at the one that gave a narrow yet nevertheless glorious victory to the Brexiteers. Since the petition has far exceeded the requisite number of signatures necessary to prompt a parliamentary debate, a debate is what will happen, though the outrageous demand for another plebiscite surely cannot be met. There was no proviso that the vote would be honoured only so long as a certain percentage of the electorate turned out; too bad for the losing side – these things cannot be determined retrospectively to appease those who didn’t like the result. Another sore loser, Labour MP David Lammy, has tweeted that Parliament should “end this nightmare” by overriding the people’s will altogether.

In 1975, Britons voted to join a European Economic Community, which many saw as a bulwark against the Soviet bloc, an economic corollary of NATO. A four-word letter in the London Daily Telegraph very shortly before that referendum expressed a widespread, albeit resignedly grudging view: “Better Brussels than Moscow”. How do I remember? Because I was working in London at the time and knew the letter writer, and recall a hard-of-hearing friend to whom it was read out replying “What do you mean? Better brothels in Moscow?”

But I digress. The point is that the electorate were voting to join a Common Market and ended up, thanks to the 1991 Maastricht Treaty, with a monstrous entity that none but the likes of the duplicitous Edward Heath and his cronies foresaw in 1975 – that the Common Market would morph into a political leviathan, a kind of super state, run by faceless unaccountable bureaucrats and smug superannuated politicians for whom the European Parliament has proved a wonderful gravy train, a political leviathan riding roughshod over national parliaments and resembling, of all things, the old Soviet Union. No wonder Britons alarmed at the erosion of the sovereignty of the Mother of Parliaments and at the unconscionable rate of immigration decided that they wanted their country to claw responsibility for its own destiny back and voted to leave the European Union.

And what a routing of the received wisdom of the arrogant elites of both left and right it has been, with the “Remain” vote confined heavily to Scotland and Northern Ireland – even most of Wales including working-class Ebbw Vale in the mining valleys and the rather cosmopolitan port city of Swansea dealt Cameron, Corbyn and company an unwelcome shock – and some exclusive, well-heeled parts of the Home Counties as well as that now most un-English of English cities, London, voting overwhelmingly to remain.

Far be it for me to agree with the egregious John Pilger, but there is an enjoyable truth in these observations of his regarding the attitude of the “Remain” camp (but not the rest of the article, which contains a deplorable illusion to Israel, I hasten to add; http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-british-said-no-to-europe):

‘The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media. This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the "remain" campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain…. A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain's ancient regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale…. The most effective propagandists of the "European ideal" have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even "cool". What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as "neoliberalism"….’

There can be little doubt that in parts of eastern England resentment at the seemingly inexorable arrival of unemployed young Poles (often with children) to compete for jobs and strain public resources and the school system has fuelled determination to cast loose from Brussels, as has the unsustainable levels of migration into other places, with the constant presence of “refugees” at Calais waiting to trick their way across the Channel and the recent intake of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of dubious “refugees” by Germany’s Merkel increasing already well-founded fears of a population increase without end and a dilution of western secular and Judeo-Christian values and culture. England is small and overcrowded. It cannot be expected to take in everyone who wants to enter, as the left (many of them Greens) demand.

Yes, much of this fear is grounded in “Islamophobia” – and with good reason. Who knows how many Jihadis and potential Jihadis have entered Europe in the wake of the Syrian disaster? UKIP’s (the UK Independence Party’s) indefatigable leader Nigel Farage, to whom enormous praise is due for making the Referendum, and therefore the “Leave” vote, a reality, has been excoriated in many quarters for playing on such fears, with a huge campaign poster showing a seemingly endless line of young male migrants trekking across Europe, but he is absolutely justified in doing so, and so are those who voted to leave owing to fears for their children’s future.

The Daily Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/24/eu-referendum-how-the-results-compare-to-the-uks-educated-old-an/) has shown that “Those aged over 60 were the most likely group to want to leave the EU, according the polls before the vote. … [T]he East coast areas that scored the highest anti-EU votes are also the areas with the highest pensioner populace. According to the polls, university graduates were the most likely people to want to remain in the EU - while those with a GCSE or equivalent as their highest qualification were more likely to back Brexit. This was a pattern that was reflected in the results. Levels of education and class overlap strongly in the UK, and so the Brexit vote also matched up with areas with higher levels of people from the DE social class – meaning people in semi-skilled or unskilled labour, those in casual labour and pensioners. This includes Blaenau Gwent in Wales, which has the highest working class population in Britain – 62 percent of voters here went for Leave. Considering how the Leave campaign adopted immigration as one of its key arguments, claiming that the current level of net migration is too high, it is unsurprising that the Remain campaign resonated more strongly with Britain's immigrant population. London, where immigration is massively higher than the rest of the country, voted overwhelmingly to Remain – by 60 percent to 40. But it's the areas in the South East and the East Midlands, where immigration has made a bigger impact only recently, that UKIP and now the Leave campaign have most resonated with.”

Regarding education, both left and right appeared to underestimate the intelligence of the average voter, one low point surely being syrupy smooth David Cameron’s trotting out of David Beckham as an example of a “Remain” voter, with the intention of influencing the masses. In the same vein, another mega-rich “Remainer”, the all too ubiquitous Sir Richard Branson, was wheeled out for propaganda purposes. Then there was the BBC’s not-so-subtle attempt to influence the vote by giving rather too much publicity to the “Remainder” leftists who sought to bash the Brexiteers by implying that anyone advocating “Leave” was a wicked racist in the mould of the murderer of MP Jo Cox, who as I’ve mentioned on my own blog was an anti-Israel activist hardly deserving of the sainthood many – including some in Anglo-Jewry’s leadership – seem to have bestowed upon her. Oh, and just to make sure that the ignorant under-educated masses got the “Remain” message, the BBC brought out a psychology specialist to warn the oldies that if they perceived the time before Britain joined the EEC as a better period their memories are playing tricks with them.

Any country which has engaged so much with the world over the centuries as Britain has is hardly narrow and inward-looking. It is a commonplace to point out that Britain – England in the main – has welcomed successive waves of refugees to its shores. There have been men of foreign birth in its army and navy for centuries past. The City of London attracted continental merchants galore, including founders of brands – Rimmel the cosmetics giant being one example – seen today as quintessentially British. The number of Londoners who have a foreign-born forebear or two is quite astonishing: they include Nigel Farage himself (two German great-grandparents and possibly a Huguenot), as well as (more extraordinarily) “one man melting pot” Boris Johnson. Some of the most notable of the eighteenth-century admirals whose bravery and skill ensured that Britain ruled the waves were men of part-foreign extraction: Keppel, Dutch; Howe, Hanoverian; Kempenfelt, Swedish. One of the country’s most acclaimed composers (many would regard him as Britain’s national composer) was a German, Handel; the half-French Isambard Kingdom Brunel was voted “greatest Briton” in a BBC television contest some years ago. Leaving the EU is not a case of “hate” but of self-preservation.

Are those over-60s who helped the “Leave” campaign to victory innate racists? I hardly think so. Here are some of names that certain famous people in Britain had when that generation was growing up, people regarded as English as Bird’s Custard or Colman’s Mustard without a second thought: Barbirolli, Constanduros, Handl, Mantovani, Edmundo Ross, not to mention such popular, even beloved, Jewish show biz personalities as Georgia Brown, Alma Cogan, Alfred Marks, Denis Norden, Frankie Vaughan, Mike and Bernie Winters, and the equally admired entertainers “of colour” – Winifred Attwell, Shirley Bassey, Cy Grant, Cleo Laine, Elisabeth Welch, and boxer Randolph Turpin. The average Briton, of that or any generation, is not a racist.

‘I voted for membership of the European Economic Community 40 years [ago]. I voted for what I thought was free trade between the UK and the six founder countries. I did not vote for what the EU was becoming, which appeared to be a federal state run by Brussels bureaucrats who I believe do not serve the interests of any of the EU member states. For this reason, I voted Leave on Thursday. Although I have felt some anxiety, I also feel hopeful. I have no doubt we will see some turbulent economic times initially, but we have seen economic turbulence through the recession, and prior to that, with the high interest rates and inflation of the 1970s and 80s. As an "out" voter, I am still European. I still believe in mutually beneficial trade deals, both with Europe, and the rest of the world, and I support controlled immigration. Britain was, is, and will continue to be a great country. I am optimistic. We should see "brexit" as an opportunity.’

Indeed, there are plenty of people of colour who voted to leave the EEC: among celebrities they include the footballers John Barnes and Sol Campbell, while a most eloquent adherent of Brexit was an Afro-Caribbean lady interviewed in the Essex town of Romford (turnout 70 per cent in favour of leaving) when the BBC went there soliciting shoppers’ views.

It has been noticeable from the first that, apart from George Galloway, the enemies of Israel have been overwhelmingly anti-Brexit. They include pro-Corbyn vicar Stephen Sizer (now well back in the Facebook groove) and Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign chief Mick Napier (a regular guest on Press TV whenever a shower of fierce invective about the Zionist Entity is sought), who on social media brought to his followers’ attention an article by Nadine El-Enany, lecturer in law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London. Inter alia:

‘[T]he referendum has licensed the expression of racism and xenophobia, which has been unleashed with deadly consequences [a reference to Jo Cox’s murder]. The racist discourse that has defined the Brexit campaign must be understood in the context of Britain’s imperial legacy. The terms on which the debate around the referendum have taken place are symptomatic of a Britain struggling to conceive of its place in the world post-Empire. The run up to the EU referendum has shown Britain for what it is. Woodwork: the washed-up bracken of the British Empire, and the ugly flotsam of its legacy of racism….’ (http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/06/19/brexit-nostalgia-empire/)

Yes, there were regrettable aspects to the conduct of Empire, but the example the author cites, the throwing overboard in 1781 of the human cargo of a slave ship for the sake of an insurance claim, is singularly weak. The author forgets the flourishing Arab slave trade which condemned black and white captives to abominable cruelties and which has continued in some cases into our own time. What chutzpah! Britain, through the Royal Navy, played a noble part during the nineteenth century in suppressing the slave trade; Britain exported parliamentary democracy to the world; British administrators abolished (or thought they had abolished) such gruesome practices as suttee and thuggee. Now, of course, received wisdom (the left’s received wisdom, imposed upon and accepted by wet elements on the centre-right) has it that everything the Empire did was evil and everything that “indigenous” peoples did and do is pure and worthy. Conveniently overlooked are the many injuries and insults to the female of the species done by Third World societies, with leftist females typically keeping shtum about them too. As for SPSC chief Napier, he might reflect on the fact that of all the United Kingdom’s constituent peoples, those who did best out of the Empire were in fact the Scots, who largely ran the East India Company!

And if there is any linkage between imperialism and the Brexit vote it is surely this: that the European Union is acting like a tyrannous latter-day Empire holding subject peoples in thraldom: one of those subject peoples have been the British, and the British have asserted their right to liberty.

Oh, I did see one obnoxiously racist pledge to vote for Brexit. It was by an inveterate Israel-hater on Facebook who, having read an article (http://forward.com/opinion/world/343245/why-bds-and-brexit-go-hand-in-hand/) suggesting that Britain remaining in the EU would benefit Israel, since it would be easier for a Britain in Europe to fight BDS and so on, declared that the article had convinced him that, in order to spite Israel, he would vote in favour of leaving.

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From MEMRI : Jordanian businessman Talal Abu Ghazaleh said that there was an “easy solution” to the Palestinian problem: “Let every Pal...

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Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون

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